Outdoor Decorations–Advent Calendar

This topic had me daydreaming for a few minutes as I recreated our house in my mind in detail, including the steep 30m/100ft driveway up to it. Our outside decorations consisted of a couple of strings of lights, mult-coloured C7 bulb lights, in our cherry tree just out front of the house. These lights looked nice, but could only be seen by those of us at the house as the tree was too far up and away to be seen from the street. So then we started putting some light strings going down the driveway. This served the bonus purpose of lighting the driveway as well. We learned quickly that we could not have those lights all the way to the bottom of the drive as young vandals couldn’t resist taking the bulbs and popping them (breaking them to hear the little explosion they made and popping sound). At the time replacement bulbs were not cheap.

In our community there was a cul-de-sac where they really went all out. It varied, but usually six or eight houses would be all decked out with decorations on their lawns, lights bestrewn everywhere and even christmas music playing on speakers. I’m not sure when this started, but apparently it is still going on today, some 22 years after I moved away.

“Howdy folks“, to quote grandma. For those of you not related to me, I am the keeper of all things family history for both sides of my family. I have been “doing” genealogy since I was about 10 years old, and even before as I listened to Nana’s stories of ... Continue reading →